Gemini* and Gopher

• Politics and World Events

  • Why I bought a wood

    In Britain, it's not usual for private individuals to own woodland. Most woodland is either part of huge country estates, or owned by state agencies like the Forestry Commission.

    In the south-east of England, family-sized plots of woodland are expensive. In the London area, where I live, they're ruinously expensive. The situation gets worse and worse every year, as more and more of the countryside gets flattened for housing and roads. I can only afford my own wood because I first bought one decades ago, when a modest plot could be had for about the same price as a car.

    I bought my first wood on a whim.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Indra 1.3.0 Available

    I have completed the release of Indra 1.3.0 for Ubuntu Touch. Indra is a Meshtastic app for Ubuntu Touch, allowing you to chat off-grid with friends, family, and neighbors. The new version comes with a wealth of new features, and it is slowly approaching parity with the official apps.

  • Lagrange for Ubuntu Touch

    I have taken on a third Ubuntu Touch app project: patching and packaging the Lagrange Gemini browser for Ubuntu Touch. This might sound like it would be simple, but there are a lot of platform-specific quirks in Ubuntu Touch that makes running Lagrange properly more difficult than it should be. Lagrange -actually- does run out of the box, without modification, on Ubuntu Touch, and behaves reasonably well. The touch input works, gestures work, and so on. In fact, there is a snap for Lagrange that runs on Ubuntu Touch.

    Unfortunately, "runs" does not mean "works for the user" in this case. The problem, as with most non-QT Ubuntu Touch apps, is the keyboard. The Ubuntu Touch keyboard wiring is present only in the Lomiri UI toolkit stack, and anything that is NOT using that will not interact with the keyboard, at least not properly.

  • LLM Exhaustion

    At work there's more and more of a push to use generative AI for basically anything. Reading emails, writing emails, writing code, you name it. Part of this is coming from the very top, where bespectacled schmucks who've never written any meaningful code in their life have been taken by the promises of Microsoft, Anthropic, and OpenAI. But part of it as well is being driven by some of my fellow colleagues, who see AI tools as a way of doing more, faster.

    I didn't get a smart phone until 2017, and since then I've been kind of appalled at how it's rewired my brain: I'm no longer content with boredom, I can feel it burning in my pocket, and at any moment, I feel like I want to take it out, check my email, check Bluesky, check Reddit. Everything people say about smart phones is true: not just about how convenient they are, how many capabilities they offer you, but how they mess with your concentration and focus. Almost ten years later, I think back. Would I be more productive without a smart phone? In some ways, no. In many ways, yeah.

  • Adventures With Haiku

    Inspired by darkghost, I decided to try out Haiku. I used BeOS back in the day and I was curious to see if Alhena would work. Getting Haiku running on my system was half the battle. It was painfully slow in VirtualBox. I tried a bootable USB stick and it was much faster but would slow to a crawl after a few minutes. It turns out the answer was counterintuitive: Set the VM to use only one CPU. Much better. I have no idea why the USB method slowed down but the symptoms were similar. Probably my PC.

    The next adventure: Alhena wouldn't start. The Haiku OpenJDK would report true for isTaskbarSupported() but then throw an exception on Taskbar.getTaskbar(). I found modal dialogs weren't modal. The Haiku JVM only supports application modality so don't try using document modality. I dealt with these oddities by testing for Haiku and setting accordingly.